Structured Text is a simple plain text markup format used by ZoPe and
ZWiki. It's similar in effect to WikiWikiWebMarkup but is more intuitive
and standardized. The idea is to have text that is easy to read both in
source and rendered form.

Zwiki supports other TextFormattingRules, Structured Text was for a long time
the default for these reasons: it was the first in zope, it's a standard, it's
simple, it's forgiving, and it allows embedded HTML and DTML. Nowadays it has
been superseded by RestructuredText as the default page type in Zwiki.

Problems with Structured Text:

There are some unsolved problems with STX, for example with international (non-ASCII) characters (check the issue tracker in the category user-editing-stx for more). Due to the age and complexity of the Structured Text code, and due to Zwiki having moved on to RestructuredText as the recommended and default page format, don't expect these things to get fixed any time soon.

don't bother trying to learn all the text formatting rules and
their interactions. Mimic the text around you; when STX doesn't do
what you want, tweak it until it looks right. Note STX usually
does not support non-latin characters. Go to the `docs
`_ or `ask for help `_
when you get really stuck or curious.